Greely's Cove

by Gideon, John

  But the very next thing that needed doing involved walking a few steps from the living room into the short hallway and knocking on a closed door. Jeremy’s door. Carl wondered why his guts were churning.

  Lorna Trosper’s body lay on the embalming table, damp and bluish under fluorescent lights. Mitch Nistler had lovingly bathed it, had gently lathered away the filth of its owner’s neglect and the scum of the early stages of putrefaction. All odor had disappeared, save the clean smells of soap and shampoo.

  He stood back from the table a moment and gazed upon her, liking what he saw, liking even more what he felt: a clarity that he had never known before, a sharpness of mind that seemed almost alien, a hungry sense of purpose that had completely eclipsed his native hesitancy. He knew exactly the order of the tasks ahead without even pausing to think through the process. For the first time in his life, he would work quickly and nimbly, using and relishing his new power over himself.

  He went purposefully to the cabinets that lined the walls of the preparation room and gathered the instruments and supplies he would need during the embalming process. Bulb syringe, tubing, scalpels, trocars, cotton, hair dryer, many others, which he laid out on a rolling tray. He readied the percolator and the aspirator. He turned on the ventilation system with its overhead fan, covering the hush of the old funeral home with a low thrumming. He retired to the adjacent dressing room, where he assembled hairbrushes, combs, manicure set, cosmetics, and perfumes.

  Having done all this, he stood a moment over the corpse, absently rubbing his latex-gloved hands against his full-length plastic apron, surveying Lorna Trosper’s body as a sculptor might survey a shapeless mass of clay. There was beauty in this discarded assemblage of flesh and bone. Beauty waiting to be liberated. He would be the liberator. He would give purpose to something that others considered garbage.

  The critical first step was draining away the blood. Mitch Nistler’s hand closed on the handle of a scalpel, which he lifted to the chest of the corpse. With his other hand he marked a high drainage point, where he made a supraclavicular incision to locate and elevate the jugular vein. The blade slid easily through the cold flesh, and the cherry-red blood began to well out.

  Carl knocked lightly on the bedroom door and leaned close to listen for an answer. The door opened, and his mouth went dry as he laid eyes on his son for the first time in nearly five years.

  “J-Jeremy.” His voice was hoarse, his throat choked with guilt. “Jeremy, it’s me, your—your dad.”

  Was there an inkling of a smile in the lad’s delicate mouth, the faintest glitter of satisfaction in those hazel eyes? Was his face too free of torment in the wake of his mother’s tragic death? Carl banished such worries and stepped into the room, pulling the door closed behind him.

  The boy stood chin-high to Carl, a shade taller than most thirteen-year-olds. Like his father he was long-limbed and lean, had the beginnings of a full-fledged “lantern jaw,” the ancestral trait of the Trospers. The Morelands’ genetic influence was apparent in the straight nose and huge, deep-set eyes. His longish, straw-colored hair bore a trace of Carl’s reddishness but was closer to Lorna’s unabashed shade of blond. He wore a freshly laundered sweatshirt of royal blue with Nike emblazoned on the front. It hung loosely on his bony shoulders.

  “It’s nice to see you, Dad,” said Jeremy, issuing a perfect white smile. His smooth voice had not yet started its descent into the range of manhood. “I hope you had a nice trip.”

  Carl blinked and grew numb with shock: When last he’d seen him, Jeremy was scarcely eight years old and much smaller; but the real difference—the one that staggered Carl and sucked the breath from his lungs, the one that turned his legs to icy jelly—was not physical. The boy now had a soul that beamed forth through those deep hazel eyes. A soul where none had been before.

  Carl’s mind reeled through excruciating memories of a child-thing who stopped shrieking only to sleep, who endlessly squirmed and twisted and drooled; who dirtied his pants and smeared the furniture with shit, shattered television screens with his fists and threw himself down staircases; who defied a heroic legion of doctors to help or even explain how such a creature could be born of Carl and Lorna Trosper, two perfectly normal people.

  God! What a purgatory this child had made for them—this animal who doctors feared would never speak; would never learn to care for himself; would forever be incapable of the tiniest, genuinely human expression—this child who had no soul.

  The recollections flashed through Carl’s mind like a slide show. The most painful was of the day on which he knew that he could take no more. Lorna and he had jousted wildly on the issue of institutionalization, Carl for and Lorna against. To closet their son in a state home, she had raged, would guarantee that he would never progress. To imprison him among psychotic strangers was unthinkable, not only because of the obscenities a young boy would suffer in such a place, but also because his only chance for a decent life lay with his family at home.

  “Sure, it’ll be hard for us! Sure, it means sacrifice! That’s what moms and dads and husbands and wives are supposed to do—sacrifice!”

  But Carl had had enough sacrifice.

  He’d become interested in state and local politics, and had displayed a knack for campaign management and media relations while doing volunteer grass-roots work for some local legislators. A congressman from Seattle had noticed his successes and had asked him to quit his tiny law practice to become his legislative assistant in Washington, DC. The job had been Carl’s foot in the door, his launching pad to bigger and better things. Looking back, he knew now that the move to D.C. had offered more than excitement, importance and money, more than he would admit at the time; it had offered escape.

  From Jeremy.

  “You’ve grown a beard,” said the boy. “It looks good.” Carl struggled for a reply, still shaken by the miracle of the new Jeremy. “I—I’m glad you haven’t forgotten what I look like. It’s been a long time.”

  The boy smiled again. “A kid doesn’t forget what his dad looks like. You’ve gotten a little gray, I see.”

  Carl felt himself paling. Jeremy seemed too alert, too mature. This was a person transformed by an unknowable miracle into someone Carl did not know, a stranger he had never met before this very moment. Carl strongly doubted that the Jeremy of five years ago could have stored away the memory of his father’s face; yet the new Jeremy remembered him beardless and without the tinges of gray over the ears.

  “Gray hair happens to everybody, I guess,” replied Carl unsteadily. “But you—you look great. You look—”

  “I’m almost normal now,” said Jeremy matter-of-factly. “Dr. Craslowe says that I might not even need any more therapy in a couple of years. He says I’m smart enough to be anything I want.”

  “I don’t doubt that. I really don’t.”

  “It’s sad about Mom, isn’t it?”

  Carl coughed, cleared his throat, coughed again. “Yes, it is. Very sad.” He put one hand on his son’s shoulder and gazed deep into those incredible eyes. “Look, Jeremy, you and I are going to be together from now on. I’ll be moving back here to Greely’s Cove within the next couple of weeks. If everything goes all right, we’ll be living right here in this house. You can keep up your therapy with Dr. Craslowe, probably even go to school, do all the things other kids do. I want you to know that—that I’ll be here for you, and that I’ll try to make up for—” Carl felt an ache in his throat and salty heat in his eyes. “For not being here when you and Mom needed me.”

  Jeremy moved closer to him, then closer still, then threw his arms around Carl’s neck and pressed his cheek against his father’s chest.

  “That sounds good, Dad. It really does.”

  Carl hugged him back, forcing himself to forget that this boy was a stranger.

  While waiting for the last few ounces of blood to drain from Lorna Trosper’s arteries and veins, Mitch Nistler took a smoke break in his customary place: under the overhang of the ga
rage entrance, where he could gaze out at the Puget Sound and breathe fresh, nonmortuary air. The afternoon sky hung in low, gauzy curtains that issued rain cold as gunmetal.

  He finished his smoke and flicked the butt away, then returned to the preparation room, where the body waited. Cavity drainage was next on the agenda.

  He picked up a trocar—a long metal rod, hollow and sharp on one end—and connected it with plastic tubing to the motorized aspirator. He marked a spot two inches above and left of Lorna Trosper’s navel.

  Mitch hesitated a moment: A trocar is the ultimate violator, a device that pierces the inner organs and sucks out their contents with motorized force, so unlike the quiet and passive process of arterial drainage, in which gravity does the work of removing blood. Though he had used a trocar countless times with the knowledge that the corpse certainly didn’t mind, this time would be different. This time he would use it on his Lorna, and he thrilled to the lunatic fear that somehow she might feel the invasion.

  The hunger rumbled inside him again, abolishing all hesitancy, and the demonic taste flooded his throat and mouth. His hands moved as if they had their own brains. He pressed the sharp point of the trocar into the tender flesh, and Lorna’s skin gave way. Into her thoracic cavity it went, up and up through the lungs and finally into the heart. Mitch flipped a switch on the panel of the aspirator, and the machine started its work.

  After emptying the heart he would withdraw the point and rotate the trocar to pierce the major vessels, where blood and other fluids might have pooled. Puncture, drain.

  Then on to the small and large intestines, feeling his way, knowing with an alien certainty just where to shove the steel. Puncture, drain.

  The liver would be next, then the stomach, the kidneys, spleen, pancreas, urinary bladder, and rectum. Puncture, drain. Puncture, drain.

  And finally the nasal passages and upper respiratory tract, from which he would suck out all purge material. Then he would begin the real work, the artistic work that would transform Lorna Trosper’s poor, defiled body into something beautiful, something that would bring joy again.

  Night crept westward from the Sound onto the shore, bringing a chill that threatened sleet, and Police Chief Stu Bromton disbanded the search party because of darkness. The wet and bedraggled searchers tramped back to Bond Road with heads lowered, faces hanging with gloom. They boarded their cars for home, a caravan of defeated crusaders whose headlight beams danced forlornly against curtains of black rain.

  After making certain that all the searchers had left the area, Stu drove alone in his police cruiser back to Greely’s Cove and parked in the City Hall lot. The dispatcher, Bonnie Willis, glanced up through the steel mesh of her cage as he came through the heavy door, a stooped and slow-moving beast of burden. He shambled to a halt after letting himself into the inner sanctum.

  “Any messages I should know about?” he asked, pocketing his keys.

  Bonnie was finishing off a large order of Chicken McNuggets with sweet ’n’ sour sauce.

  “Ken Zolten just called,” she said, chawing down the last morsel of an unfortunate bird. “He wants to know where you plan to start searching tomorrow and what time. I told him you’d call.”

  Stu ground his teeth. What good could possibly come from mounting another search? It would end as all the others had—in total, tormenting failure. The sheriff’s office would call out its reserve search-and-rescue team; the National Guard would send a dozen volunteers; the Seattle PD would keep its bloodhounds on station for maybe three more days; and after several hundred man-hours of dogged slogging along forested roads and rugged beach, after poking into overgrown culverts and ditches until they could tramp and slog and poke no longer, this search too would peter out. There was, after all, a limit to what public agencies could spend on behalf of one little girl.

  But it had to be done, of course. No one, least of all Sandy and Ken Zolten, could simply accept failure without making the effort. The search would be renewed and sustained to the very limits of funds and human muscles. Stu would lead it as he had led all the others, chalking up another grand goose egg for his fellow citizens to buzz about behind his back. No clues would be found, and the case of little Teri Zolten would enlarge the bloating list of unsolved disappearances.

  Stu called Ken Zolten and, after outlining tomorrow’s strategy, offered pat reassurances to the enervated, inconsolable father. The county forensics team had dusted Mrs. Solheim’s Toyota for fingerprints and had sampled the stinking grime on the passenger’s seat. Surely the crime-lab analysis would turn up something, and word would come back in a week or so. Teri’s description had gone out over the Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, and by now every law-enforcement agency in the entire nation was on the lookout for her.

  “We’re bound to find her, Ken”—sure we are—“so try and get some sleep.”

  After talking to Ken Zolten he returned the half-dozen calls from the news media that had piled up since early afternoon, starting with the biggest outfits. Most wanted simple updates on this latest disappearance, but Seattle’s KOMO-TV was planning a news special on the Mystery of Greely’s Cove. They assumed he’d cooperate to the fullest. Of course he would, he told the eager female reporter who sounded like the owner of a fresh master’s degree in broadcast journalism. Always glad to have help from the news media. Never can tell: a viewer might have seen something suspicious or recognize one of the missing and just might be able to blah blah blah.

  He stood up from his cluttered metal desk and stretched. The wall clock said 9:45. His muscles ached from the rigors of an all-day tramp through misty woods, and his eyes were blurry. But he wasn’t really tired—at least not tired enough to go home to Judy and the kids.

  What he needed was a beer.

  For the rare occasions that demanded a beer after work on weeknights other than Fridays, he kept a set of casual civvies in a metal wall locker in the squad room. He showered in the cramped stall at the rear of the squad room and changed into them.

  Before leaving the station house, Stu locked the evening’s paperwork in his office file. He was about to shove the drawer closed when his eyes fell on a folder newly inked with Lorna Trosper’s name. Without knowing why, he opened it and perused the typewritten forms, all of which he had already studied in great detail. Investigative report. Coroner’s report. Death certificate and medical examiner’s findings. Tucked among the official documents was a rumpled slip torn from a notepad: Lorna’s suicide note.

  Stu had examined it at least twenty times, but now he studied it again, shaking his head. Legally, the note was the property of the decedent’s heirs, inasmuch as the criminal justice authorities planned no autopsy or inquest. It did not belong to Stu Bromton. Yet he slipped it into the pocket of his light breaker, thinking to keep it if the rightful owners did not ask for it. He had, after all, loved Lorna Trosper as much as anyone. He had loved her from the very moment he laid eyes on her, back on that golden day at the University of Washington when Carl Trosper introduced his new girlfriend. Stu had continued to love her, even after she had started having an affair with that miserable profligate, Renzy Dawkins. The scrawly note, though nearly illegible, was the final fragment of the woman who had unwittingly lived at the center of his fantasies for almost fifteen years. As such, it was a minor, private treasure.

  “I see you’re headed out for a nightcap,” said Bonnie Willis as her boss passed the dispatcher’s cage. Bonnie, his one genuine ally in Greely’s Cove, knew the meaning of the civvies.

  “Yeah, to Liquid Larry’s, I guess. I don’t want to run into any of the city fathers.”

  “Good choice. You won’t catch any of them in that place. What should I say if Judy calls?”

  “Tell her the truth. If she doesn’t like it, she can go home to Daddy.”

  Liquid Larry’s was quiet, even for a Sunday night. A handful of patrons leaned against the bar, chatting, drowsing, or watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on the color set that hung
from the ceiling. Three or four others had clustered around the giant fish tank that stood against a far wall, oohing and ahhing and Jesus-Christ-ing over Liquid’s prized fixture, an Oscar fish named Hammerstein. For one dollar, a patron could buy a live goldfish from the swarm that Liquid kept in a separate tank. The patron was then entitled to toss the goldfish into Hammerstein’s tank, upon which the Oscar fish—a rotund, brownish predator the size of a man’s two fists—would corner the terrified goldfish and wolf it down without ceremony. The bloody spectacle had great appeal to many of Liquid’s regulars, and Hammerstein seemed forever hungry.

  Stu slid onto a stool at the deserted end of the bar and ordered an Oly, which Liquid served in a frosted mug. Behind the bar were display cards of Bic disposable lighters, Bromo Seltzer packets, and air fresheners for the car. Sausages floated in huge cloudy jars, pickled eggs in clear ones. Lighted scenes of rippling waterfalls and dancing streams advertised Rainier and Olympia beer, while a less artful sign hawked chances in the Washington State lottery.

  After draining his beer in three long slugs, Stu ordered another and contemplated having one of Liquid’s infamous gut-bombs, a huge cheeseburger laden with mushrooms and fried onions. But he decided that he wasn’t really hungry enough, which was strange, since he’d not eaten all day.

  He resisted glancing up when the front door swung open, meaning to disregard the figure that sidled over and took the stool next to him. But the voice that ordered a beer could not be ignored. It belonged to Carl Trosper.

  Stu swung around on his stool, grinning wearily. “This guy’s money is no good, Liquid. Whatever he wants, I’m buying.”

  “Whatever you say, Sonny Butch,” intoned the barkeep, placing a mug before Carl with professional reverence.

  “Now, don’t try to tell me,” said Stu, leaning close to his old pal, “that you just happened to wander into this place.”

  “Okay, I won’t,” said Carl, sipping foam that stuck to his mustache, “because I didn’t. I was getting a little antsy, so I called your house, and Judy said you were at the station. Then I called the station and your dispatcher said you were out on patrol. When I left my name and number, she said, welllll, maybe the boss would want me to know where he really is, since I’m the long-lost buddy he always talks so much about.